Philosophy
A spoken story is different from memorizing a piece of written text. For a text to become a naturally told story that is easy to remember it can sometimes be necessary to summarize some parts, to add some implicit information, or to repeat something that had been said before.
Also, natural sounding stories in some languages may contain extra repetition, include rhetorical questions for the listeners, or may actually be presented in song form. For this reason our stories are "crafted", rather than translated line by line.
The crafted Biblical stories aim to be faithful to the message of the Scripture portion they are based on. They may however at times leave out some details or sub-points, to make the story shorter or easier to understand. Sometimes some additional background information is included, if it is considered needed to help listeners understand the story better.
Read more about this in "Go for the papaya" and in "Christopher learns about storytelling." Underneath you will find an example of a crafted story.
For background information regarding the rationale for Bible Story telling in general, we refer to the many other places that are available on the internet. Please see the links page.
Example story: Cain and Abel (Genesis 4)
After Adam and Eve had been sent out from the garden, they had children. They named their first son Cain, and the second son, Abel. As they grew up, Cain became a farmer of the land, and Abel began to raise sheep-goats.
One day, both of them gave an offering to God. Abel took the first kid of his sheep-goat, the very best one, and offered it to God. Cain also gave an offer, but he offered only a little bit of the harvest from his land.
And God accepted Abel’s offering, but not Cain’s.
By seeing this Cain became very angry. But God said to Cain, “ why do you get so angry? If you do what is right, then your offering would also be accepted. Don’t give in to the sin in your heart, but fight it. You must rule over it!”
But even after hearing the warning of God, Cain went to his brother, and said to him: “Come, let’s go for a walk.” Then Cain took him to his field, and there he killed him. And then he went away.
Right after this, God asked him, "Cain, where is your brother Abel?”
Cain said, “How would I know? Am I his caretaker?”
But God said: “Cain, what have you done? Do you think I would not know? Because of what you did, you will be banished from here. Even if you try to farm your field, it will give you no harvest. You were a farmer; but now you will become a homeless wanderer.”
After hearing God’s judgment, Cain was shocked. He said: “this is too much, my punishment is greater than I can bear. You are banning me from the land and from your presence. I will be a fugitive, wandering the earth and whoever sees me will kill me!” Then God said, “no, no one will kill you. Because if they do, I will punish them worse.” And then Cain went away from there.